Blake Butler
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
New from PGP: The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit
I have read The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit by Rupert Wondolowski. It is as good as the title would mandate being to warrant having such a bad ass title on the cover. The poems here are amazing and weird and funny, and for $9 you can’t really ask for much more. Get this quick.
If you don’t believe me just by believing, here is the first part of one of the poems in the book:
I wake up screaming.
I scream scratching the dog’s belly in bed,
scream seeing the third pillow has fallen to the dusty floor.
I scream during breakfast, wet bananas on lips.Shaving, I scream. I scream cleaning up the bloody mess.
Scream when the neighbors pound, when the police
come knocking.
I scream on the walk to work, yard ladies gyrate
gardening shorts,
Arabbers hurl eggplant torpedos at me, their horses stomp, dogs bark.I scream the news grotesque,
football game shooting in Anchorage,
Middle East imploding.I scream under Manhattan like undigested pork.
The previous day, screaming, I crossed
a small lake in the countryside on a rowboat.
Screaming, I ate a picnic lunch, ants
forming a moustache above my screamhole.I scream quietly during a polo-shirted
golf match, a drink umbrella catching
on my sore uvula.
The rest of the book is as fun and new as that. Adam at PGP just keeps poppin bottles. Check ‘er out.
Publishing Genius Press
December 2008
52 pages
5×7″
perfect bound
Cover design by Stephanie Barber, digitized by justin sirois.
Page design by Adam Robinson with thanks to Chris Toll.
Rain Taxi Benefit Auction
from Rain Taxi:
RAIN TAXI BENEFIT AUCTION!
Our benefit auction has returned, and this year it’s enormous! Held on eBay, the auction lets you support Rain Taxi while getting cool literary stuff. Most items were donated by authors or publishers to help Rain Taxi stay in gear: You’ll find signed first editions, gorgeous broadsides, rare chapbooks, seminal graphic novels, quirky collectible books, handcrafted items, and more! M.T. ANDERSON, John ASHBERY, Paul AUSTER, Charles BERNSTEIN, Robert BLY, Paul BOWLES, Stephen COLBERT, Samuel R. DELANY, Neil GAIMAN, Patricia HAMPL, Richard HELL, Jaime HERNANDEZ, Garrison KEILLOR, Jonathan LETHEM, David MARKSON, Henry MILLER, Rick MOODY, Barack OBAMA, Ron PADGETT, Jerome ROTHENBERG, Joe SACCO, Arthur SZE, Jeff VANDERMEER, Anne WALDMAN, Keith and Rosmarie WALDROP, and Marjorie WELISH are just some of the authors whose works you’ll find. To see the full listings, go to our online benefit auction now!
Eugene Lim’s Reading Diary
For those who often feel they’re having trouble figuring out what to read next, if you have any proclivity for experimentally-based fiction and so forth, the reading diary of Eugene Lim, editor of Ellipsis Press, is a really great database of some obscure to semi-obscure works that all seem worthy of greater attention.
Lim’s reviews are short and smart and to the point, and don’t spend more than enough time talking than to get you excited on the concept and execution of the book. Whereas other review sites can be burdensome or have too much to say, these are snippets, wise-minded ones, and there is quite a trove already online.
Recently posts by Lim include: The Changeling by Joy Williams, The Easy Chain by Evan Dara, Main Brides by Gail Scott, Liquidation by Irme Kirtesz, Marsupial by Derek White, and months and months more. A quick fix for your ‘what next’ troubles, for sure, and some great musings for books you might have already read.
And if you haven’t yet already, Lim’s own Fog and Car should be right at the top of your list. Here’s my prior post on that novel. Do a buy.
I like Rick Moody a lot, wanna fight?
Rick Moody, along with David Foster Wallace, was one of the big reasons I started writing fiction. The first book of his that I read was ‘Purple America.’ The opening pages of ‘Purple America’ are a man describing his mother’s failing body and the methods he employs to care for it in mostly one long run on sentence, post-Ginsberg ‘Kaddish’ style, and it is among the most beautiful openings of a book I can remember. This is an excerpt of the sentence:
“whosoever slips his mother’s panties up her legs and checks the dainty hairless passage into her vulva one more time, because he can’t resist the opportunity here for knowledge, whosoever gags briefly at his own forwardness, whosoever straps his mother’s bra onto her, though the value of a bra for her is negligible, whosoever slips a housedress over her head, getting first one arm and then the other tangled in the neck hole,”
etc etc. I realize more and more looking back how much I learned from Moody’s poetic listmaking devices and explorative thinking set in prose in the same way that I learned from DFW, but differently. Moody is a different beast, more florid in a certain way and more in a poetic mode, but the way he constructs these monsters of increasing awareness and tenor, I don’t know, they definitely have been important to me.
The Tree of No by Sandy Florian
from Action Books:
The Tree of No, Sandy Florian’s second book, is now up for sale actionbooks.org. We are not officially releasing it until February, but to celebrate the end of the Year of the Squealing Pig and the start of the Year of Lemurs (All Over Our Bodies) we are starting to sell the books early on our website only.
Here’s an excerpt:
I become pregnant with a hole. Scoop it out and the void comes down on its head. Then give it thanks and sing into the pit. For he is mindful of me. For he is manful on me. I make a beast of him like I make a beast of the bird, like I make a beast of fish, like I make a beast of the sea scrolling under my feet.
This looks amazing. I have already ordered. Action Books is very on point.
While you’re at it, may I recommend Lara Glenum’s THE HOUNDS OF NO, Aase Berg’s REMAINLAND, and Tao Lin’s book if you don’t have it: all three of these I own and love. I also just ordered: MOMMY MUST BE A MOUNTAIN OF FEATHERS. How can you not want a book with that title?
Swink is back
It’s been a long while since we heard anything from Swink. They came out of the gates huge and killed everything in 3 issues, then entered a long, I can’t even remember how many year, period of blank, in which their fate seemed to be belly up.
Well, as of this week I think, they have returned with a brand new website, and a new all-digital format. I am really glad to see them back.
Their reincarnation contains the 6-pronged strand of publishings including: fiction, poetry, and essay, plus three Swink original departments: Dead Letter Office, Wit’s End, and You are Here.
Go check out the site to see what’s up. Their subs are also open, and electronic.
Currently you can read work by Greg Ames, Brian Oliu, Edith Pearlman, Ann Cummins, and a ton more.
This is exciting. Welcome back Swink.
Uncategorized / 16 Comments
December 10th, 2008 / 2:51 pm
December 10th, 2008 / 2:51 pm
Word Spaces (1): David Gianatasio
Today we’re kicking off a new feature at the Giant, WORD SPACES, which will consist of authors talking about where they work when they are writing and how the space affects their work, etc.
To kick it off we have David Gianatasio, the author of MIND GAMES, just out from Word Riot Press. (also the author of SWIFT KICKS from So New Media). He is a longtime fixture in online and independent lit and a really good guy.
Here is a piece from the book at Alice Blue Review.
And here is where David writes:
David's writing area, cozy.
My workspace is a small hallway — the entryway, really — of my apartment. It’s a very nice apartment — you can’t really see how nice it is from the picture/s. The hallway is the most cluttered & cramped area by far.
Why write in a hallway? Well, that’s where I keep the computer. It’s a laptop with a WiFi card so I could write anyplace in the apartment. But then I wouldn’t be in the hallway. You see what I mean.
The computer’s on an old bar filled with old VHS tapes I never watch. I’ll stick my hand in and pull one out at random. Godzilla vs. The Thing. Classic.
Maybe it’s symbolic. The entryway to my home holding the doors of perception, the gateway to other times & places, unlocking the secrets of soul & mind.
I was really reaching there. Sorry. Next film … Columbo: Prescription Murder. In Columbo, they showed you whodunnit in the opening scene. I always found that reassuring.
The smoke and carbon detectors are right above my head when I work. More than once, they’ve gone off in a shrill and nerve-shredding fashion, causing me to squeal like a girl and stand up suddenly, knocking my computer to the floor. Also when my wife comes home, she opens the door and knocks me off my chair.
There’s a photo of me as a 7 year old to the right of the computer, above the printer. Sometimes, when I’ve written something really good (like my new book, MIND GAMES from Word Riot Press!) or remembered my login for PayPal, I turn to that picture and say: “Way to go, little guy!”
I should probably stop doing that.
I’m going to reach in for one last tape …
I was hoping it was a Barney the Dinosaur (I know there’s one in there), or something racy so I could say: “Whoa, that’s a naughty one!” But in fact I pulled out a blank unused cassette. Empty … waiting for content. Will it ever reach its potential?
Given the theme of this piece, I think that says it all.
And really, how do you even know for sure there are tapes in these? Maybe I use it to store cheese. And if I do … well … I should probably stop doing that.
Look out for more of this feature with some really awesome people coming up, hopefully weekly for Wednesdays…
Kathryn Regina’s AS I SAID
New from Publishing Genius‘s THIS PDF Chapbook Series: Kathryn Regina’s AS I SAID…
Kathy is one of my favorites. I can’t ever remember reading something by her that didn’t invoke light and often make me laugh. She is the real thing, and this new one is something to be savored. I am going to order the print version so I can really dig in on it fully. Go.
Uncategorized / 14 Comments
December 9th, 2008 / 11:22 pm
December 9th, 2008 / 11:22 pm
Writing to Music
Do you write to music? I used to constantly, I thought what I was writing to a large part affected what I write. Now I find it pretty hard to concentrate in anything except total silence.
When the mood strikes me, though, I think my most common writing soundtrack is Fennesz. I wrote a lot of my novella to Fennesz, as well as a lot of the recent things I’ve been working on. ‘A Year in a Minute’ seems a perfect backdrop to me. I often find that ambient music with no beat and/or layers and for certain no words, is vital to me to writing.
I’ve also written quite a bit to Fantomas’s hour+ 1-track album DELIRIVM CORDIA. The panic house of collage and weird sounds that it compiles is a great thing to rub off of, at least if you’re writing about nausea and babies and crap.
Here they are performing a section of it live (the record is much different but the video is cool):
MEGA BONUS LITERATURE MUSIC TREAT: Gian sent this super sex mash up he made of Dr Dre vs. Dylan Thomas. I always knew Dre had it in him.
Download: DRE VS DYLAN
There’s a Christmas present for ya, courtesy of the Tyrant.
Anyway, I am curious: what do other people write to?
Secret Santa Special Offers
With Indie Press Secret Santas being assigned today (massive props to Ryan Call for going through and organizing all that and emailing everybody, holy shit), we’ve received a couple special offers from publishers with Santa-only deals lined up.
1st off, Hobart is offering half-price subscriptions. Usually they are $18, so for $9 you can get your gift recipient a year’s worth of a really excellent lit mag. That even leaves room for two gifts. Can’t beat that. In your paypal order, just mention that you are ni the SS program, and make sure to include your recipient’s address (which will be coming with your assignments, half of which have already been sent. If you haven’t gotten yours yet, it should be coming soon).
2nd, from Dzanc Books:
Dzanc Books is excited about the HTMLGIANT Secret Santa program and will happily gift wrap any books ordered through our website for the Secret Santa program. We will gift wrap the book(s), place the gift wrapped books inside a postal envelope (we typically ship things priority) or box, as well as a half sheet page designed by our Art Director, Steven Seighman, which will announce that the accompanying gift wrapped package is arriving as a result of the Secret Santa program, and that their Secret Santa ordered them something from Dzanc Books, and that they should hold off opening the package until Xmas.
http://www.dzancbooks.org/store/index.html
All a Secret Santa will need to do when they order directly from us, is add a note through the Paypal order that it’s for the HTMLGiant program. We will also accept checks/orders via email as well. Those can be sent to dan@dzancbooks.org.
With these deals, you can get a pretty hefty present for $20, not to mention all the other sales going on now (such as the Word Riot bundles).
If publishers would like to extend other Santa promo deals for customers, the comments section is wide open.